P-to-P aims for the spotlight at O'Reilly show

InfoWorld | Networking

P-to-P gets real

At the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer Conference this week in San Francisco, several companies touted platforms and applications designed to ramp up the appeal of p-to-p.

Chantilly, Va.-based Roku Technologies demonstrated its Roku Platform that allows a PC to act as the hub of personal and corporate information. The company also unveiled its Roku Share product, which lets organizations share information instantly using drag-and-drop functionality with selected groups, according to Roku officials. The system features notification services, wireless rendering, and active search. Roku's software is included as a bundled component of Hewlett-Packard's eServices enterprise portal offering.

Tigard, Ore.-based Thinkstream previewed its distributed information and commerce engine, which leverages a distributed architecture to access an unlimited number of information sources, such as Web sites, file servers, databases, documents, and video.

Meanwhile, Bellevue, Wash.-based OpenDesign showed a platform that attempts to combine client/server and p-to-p architectures. OpenDesign's system is a collection of smart, programmable routers that can execute code, policies, and data -- all critical to distributed enterprise applications.

Porivo Technologies, based in Durham, N.C., launched at the conference a pilot beta program for its peerReview, a Web performance testing application that uses the distributed computing model to evaluate, load test, and analyze Web sites.

Another big name vendor, Novell, also had a presence at the show.

Eric Schmidt, CEO and chairman of the Provo, Utah-based company, took part in a panel discussion exploring p-to-p's value in the enterprise. Schmidt said Novell is examining the technology.

"You need a consumer adoption strategy," Schmidt said. "If you have a killer app, with no adoption strategy, you won't get there."

"[P-to-p] is in the early stages where you need to make sure the technology works and [know] what people will use it for," Schmidt added in an interview.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft tested the waters at the show with a booth and by participating in a conference panel discussion.

Dave Stutz, software architect at Microsoft, expressed interest in the value of p-to-p infrastructure as a window on society.